Wings over the Watcher Read Online Free Page B

wife, Beatrice. She’s gone.”
    Joanna felt a sudden quickening. So Pat had been right. Beatrice had had a lover and it
had
been that which had lain behind the fitness attempt.
    And now?
    Surely it was obvious. She had left to be with him.
    Something in her crowed for all middle-aged women whoare married to unexciting men who take them for granted and break out. It was the clichéd stuff of modern fiction.
    But one look at her husband’s face was enough to stub that idea out. Arthur Pennington was suffering.
    She made a feeble attempt at mediating. “When you say, “gone”, do you mean she’s left you?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happened. I only know she’s apparently disappeared. She isn’t home. I expected her back from work last night around six and they said she hadn’t been in all day. She didn’t come home at all last night. I lay awake, right through the night, waiting for her, Inspector. So where is she? We hadn’t had a row or a fall out or anything. I just don’t understand.”
     
    In cases like this the usual story is that the woman has decided to leave her life – her husband – her children – her home – everything – either temporarily or permanently. And Joanna had secret knowledge from the mouth of Beatrice herself, which put her in a position of cognisance.
     
    “Actually,” she’d confided at the top of a very steep hill, her face as red as a beetroot with the effort of the climb, “I am married. I do have a husband. But I also have someone else.”
    Joanna had been simultaneously startled, excited and intrigued. Her first thought had been: You could not judge by appearances. “Really?” had been all she’d managed.
    “Yes.” Beatrice’s face had been solemn – and at the same time almost ethereal with this hidden love. “Oh yes,” she’d confessed. “Someone quite special.” And her face had reminded Joanna of old, religious paintings, which portrayed adoration.
     
    So this news from Arthur Pennington was hardly unexpected.
    Joanna came back to the present. Pennington was staring at her, his head to one side, chicken-like, waiting for her answers.
    And party to this secret knowledge Joanna was uncomfortable. Did Arthur Pennington know about
the someone
else
? Did he have any suspicion that his wife had this secret life?
    She was aware that she must approach this nutty little problem with great delicacy so she sat right back in her chair and adopted a friendly, informal approach. “Let me ask you a few questions, Mr Pennington.”
    He sat very upright. “Go ahead,” he said with a tinge of bravado about him.
    Korpanski chose that moment to barge into the room, spied Pennington and apologised. Joanna seized the opportunity to ask the aggrieved husband whether he would like a tea or coffee, knowing that he could probably do with something a little stronger.
    Pennington elected for a tea, she for a coffee and Mike withdrew to act as tea-boy.
    While she resumed the questioning. “Has your wife packed any clothes?”
    “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “Women have so many, don’t they?”
    So he didn’t know the contents of his wife’s wardrobe. What man did? Matthew? Mentally she shook her head. He no more or less than most men. Women’s wardrobes were a testimony to their complicated psyches. All those hidden parcels for projected transformations they would never achieve.
“I’ve had it for ages, dear”
, mistaken never-worn purchases and old favourites women could never bear to part with – the size 10s they would never again wear – retained simply to remind them of the waist they once had, the size they once were, the person they would never again be. The clothes they had been persuaded to buy against their better judgement by well-meaning friends or overbearing shop assistants.
“You look lovely in fuchsia, madam.”
When it was the last colour they should ever wear. There were the evening dresses they could not wear